Ryan Gosling would do anything for love in Drive. Yep, anything. Even that.

There is no safer feeling than driving alone at night. You
have the illusion of control, the freedom of speed, and the assurance
(not even half true) that if you make a mistake, only you will have to
pay the violent fine. Drive, the luxurious new L.A. noir from
Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, is the most brutally antisocial
movie of the year. It is also the most romantic—but it is primarily
spellbound by the romance of isolation. It is about being very good at a
solitary pursuit, and valuing another person enough to allow her a
glimpse of what you do, only to realize that letting her in exposes her
to terrible danger.

Writing this out, I
realize it sounds like a lot of macho, self-pitying poppycock. And for a
movie about standing—or, rather, sitting—alone, Drive has
attracted a torrent of intoxicated hosannas at each festival screening.
But I confess I also fell for it, hard. It engrossed and moved me like
no other picture I’ve seen this year. And I have a sliver of
justification: The entire history of noir, stretching back to The Maltese Falcon through Drive’s obvious influences like Walter Hill’s The Driver and Michael Mann’s Thief, is a lot of macho, self-pitying poppycock. That does not diminish the power of those movies. If Drive,
a deliberate throwback, belongs in their company, it is because it is
unreservedly committed to the decadent masochism of its fantasy.

It is also exhilarating filmmaking, from soup to swollen nuts. Drive
conclusively establishes Winding Refn as a director whose every work
must be seen. It contains half a dozen white-knuckle action
sequences—starting with a robbery getaway timed to the final buzzer of
an L.A. Clippers game—yet its closest relative is the lightheaded,
restrained eroticism of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. In this context, the relentless carnage of Drive’s
second half makes a sick kind of sense: It is a movie about men who
only know how to show loyalty and care by staving in the skulls of other
men. Winding Refn’s last film, Valhalla Rising, featured vikings
disemboweling each other by hand, and the characters here are not much
more civilized, though they do have more cosmopolitan surroundings,
smearing each other across some handsomely paneled elevator interiors.
It is some kind of advancement, I suppose, that while the characters
speak after very long pauses, they have moved past grunts.

When boy meets boy in Drive,
homicide is inevitable. But first boy meets girl. The boy is Ryan
Gosling, a stunt-car driver with illegal sidelines and a stockpile of
toothpicks. The girl is Carey Mulligan, a waitress with a young son
(Kaden Leos) and a husband (Oscar Isaac) about to get out of jail. Their
courtship is as much an act of protection as desire. Both actors do
astounding work with silent glances; it would not be fair to call their
performances subtle, but they are perfectly pitched to a movie where
everything but their love—and mutual devotion to her child—is
disposable.

The collateral damage
includes Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks and Ron Perlman—great
faces deployed in delightful ways. At the edges of thefilm
lurks Albert Brooks: His chummy but remorseless mobster is a variation
on all his comedic characters who used menschiness to hide a petty soul.
I can’t escape the nagging feeling that Drive does the same
thing, that its ravishing look and lonesome honor are a ruse to to
justify an inner vacuum of human decency. It raises the question,
finally, of whether a great movie has to be a moral movie. Is it enough
that it is true to its own code? What if that code is ultimately tribal
and barbaric? Drive took me where I wanted to go, and it is frightening how euphoric I felt speeding into darkness.